Sunshine (17 page)

I had been avoiding thinking about any implications in a sucker victim found three blocks from the coffeehouse, as I had been avoiding noticing there was more local sucker activity at all. If I'd been avoiding it less hard, it might have occurred to me that some kind of news gang would turn up to pry a few ravaged expressions and maybe if they were lucky some sign of an incipient crack-up out of some of the natives. (Possibly not realizing that Old Town always had natives on the brink of a crack-up.) The police hadn't identified the body yet—they called it “the victim”—and nobody at the coffeehouse was missing anyone.

Vampire senses are different from human in a number of ways. The one that is relevant in this case is that landscape which is all one sort of thing is … more penetrable … to the extent of its homogeneity
.…

I had no idea what the homogeneity of TV broadcasting might be from a vampire perspective. I didn't want to know.

The camera swung to point at me.

I raised a hand against it. “No,” I said.

“But—” Mr. Teeth said. He was trying to decide whether more smiling was called for or if he should try a frown. I put up my other hand, blanking out most of the lens. Quasi-Borg said, “Okay, okay, I get the idea,” and let the thing sag. If it was still taping it was getting a good shot of a dirty apron, purple jeans, and red sneakers.

Mr. Teeth, the mike still glued under his chin, said, “Miss Seddon, we only want a few words with you. You must understand that the assaults on any human by the Others are always of first importance to every other human, and it is the duty of a responsible media that we report anything of that sort as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Miss Seddon, a man
died
here.”

“I know,” I said. “Fine. Go report it.”

Mr. Teeth looked at me a moment. I could see him deciding on the hard-man approach. “Miss Seddon, it is very plain to many of us that whether you wish to discuss your experiences or not, you too have been a victim of an Other attack, and the fact that a mere few weeks later a
vampire
victim should turn up near your place of employment cannot be considered insignificant.”

“Two months,” I said. “Not a few weeks.”

“Miss Seddon,” he said, “do you still deny that you were set on by Others?”

“I don't say anything one way or another,” I said. “I don't remember.”

“Miss Seddon—”

“She's told you she has nothing to say to you,” said Charlie. “I think that's enough.” He was so rarely hostile I almost didn't recognize him. In the back of my mind, a thought was forming: if he can get rid of a tanked up six-and-a-half-foot construction worker with a few friendly words, which he can, and if he just failed a few minutes ago to get rid of a tanked-up-on-his-own-importance TV asshole because he had been unable to get confrontational about it, what does it mean that he's suddenly feeling so antagonistic toward Mr. Responsible Media Reporter now? I didn't like the answer to that question. It meant that he thought Mr. Responsible Media—and our suddenly overwatchful Pat and Jesse and their friends—were right about what had happened to me. How could they
tell
? I hadn't said anything. And nobody gets away from … they
couldn't
think it was vampires.

Mr. Responsible Media was looking rebellious, but this was my country. I was Cinnamon Roll Queen and most of those assembled were my devoted subjects. “Hey, leave her alone, man,” said Steve, idly rolling up to stand next to the counter stool he'd been sitting on. Steve isn't major league tall, but he is major league in the looming unspoken threat department. Things had gone kind of quiet in the last few minutes while everyone watched me refuse to be interviewed, and now they went quieter yet. One or two other people—that is to say, guys—stood up, just as idly as Steve had. I was suddenly glad it was Mel's night off after all; under the good-old-boy exterior he had a temper on him, and he'd been feeling kind of protective of me lately. Over Mr. Responsible Media's shoulder I met Jesse's gaze. He and Pat and John were sitting squashed together at a two-person table. I could see by their stillness that they
weren't
standing up … and I didn't have to think too hard to figure out that this was because they knew Mr. Responsible Media would recognize them as SOFs and they were giving me a break. Because they knew I needed a break. Oh skegging
damn
.

“All right, all right,” muttered Mr. Responsible, and he waved at his camera slave, and they left the coffeehouse reluctantly.

“Thanks,” I said to everyone generally. I patted Steve's hamlike shoulder on my way back to the bakery (and sent him three cranberry and sprouted wheat muffins via Mary, which were his favorite) and didn't come out again till closing, although Mary came in a few times to tell me what was going on. She had her break in the bakery too so she could tell me in detail about the interview Mr. Responsible had had with Mrs. Bialosky, who knew how to play an audience. She'd learned a lot in the years of running our flower bed, and she'd never been somebody any sane person would want to jerk around. Mary had me laughing by the time she had to go back to work.

Jesse came in right after Mary left. It was like he'd been listening at the door. He stood there looking at me. I went on hurling large spoonfuls of batter into millions of muffin cups. Muffin cups in my bakery were real sorcerer's apprentice material, like the dough for the cinnamon rolls every morning could have stood in for The Blob. “There isn't room to hang around back here,” I said. There wasn't, although people often did. It was illegal to have customers back here, but the local food inspectors were all Charlie's friends, just like our local fire inspector was. We'd had the head inspector's daughter's fifteenth birthday party here about six months ago: the story was that the coffeehouse was the compromise reached between the party her parents wanted her to have and the party
she
wanted to have. I made six chocolate chip layer cakes for the event (and chocolate butter alphabet cookies to spell out HAPPY BIRTHDAY CATHY over the frosting, because I don't do fancy decorating, life is too short), and they were all gone that evening. Some of her friends were still coming back. I was going to need a second apprentice if Charlie's became a haunt of teenage boys.

“Mary was in here for fifteen minutes.”

“You tell time real well,” I said. “Is that an important skill in SOF? Mary will fit on the stool. You won't.” I kept a stool wedged in the one semifree corner that wasn't next to the ovens, for staff on break, or anyone else I felt like letting into my territory. No SOF was on that list tonight, and I wasn't in a good mood.

Jesse went and sat on the stool. He did fit. SOF made you keep in shape to keep your job. No lard butts there. The SOFs weren't that much easier to keep topped up than teenage boys. All that fitness makes you eat. Pat in particular could put it away. When he sat on that stool I had to keep a sharp eye on him. He could make whole loaves of bread disappear in moments.

I opened the oven doors and dragon breath roared into the room. I shoved in muffin tins. I closed the doors and set the timer. I dumped the bowls in the sink and turned on the water. The coffeehouse doesn't have the most efficient layout in the world, and the dishwasher is in the main kitchen. When I had time, I washed up my own stuff.

I made as much noise as possible.

“Rae,” said Jesse at last.

“Yeah,” I said.

“We're on the same side.”

I didn't say anything. Are we? Am I sure I'm on the right side any more? It was a very pretty conundrum. People don't escape from vampires. Since I'm alive … It wasn't really consorting with the enemy. It was just something that happened. Yeah, and it just
happened
that I could keep the sun off a vampire.

It wasn't him I needed to forget. It was
me
. It was what
I
had done.

Why would a vampire stick around to feed a human milk and muffins—and make sure she didn't choke on them? Honor among thieves? I'd said that. To him. Why the hell had I
wanted
to save him? He'd almost had me for dinner. He'd thought about it.

Why had my tree said
yessssss
?
What the hell was I
?

Maybe the fact that the vampire slash on my breast hurt all the time and wouldn't heal was a good sign. Maybe it meant I was still human.

Eventually Jesse got down from the stool and went away.

The nightmares that night were particularly bad, and apparently I'd been clawing myself in my sleep, because when the alarm went off at three-forty-five and I groaned and rolled over and turned the light on, not only had the scab split open again but my pillow had big ugly streaks and blotches of blood all over it.

The alarm was still going off a quarter hour earlier than it used to because it took me a quarter hour longer to get moving in the morning than it used to. I was still tired all the time. Okay, it was just the nightmares stopping me sleeping properly. Plus worrying about stuff like my face in the globenet archive and what all my friends thought. I wasn't losing enough blood from the vampire slash to make me tired that way. And it didn't hurt all that much. It was just a nagging nuisance.

I drove to the coffeehouse and made cinnamon rolls and rye bread—it was rye bread day—and then I made banana honey nut bread and fig bars and Hell's Angelfood and Killer Zebras and a lot of muffins, and by late morning I was done. I had the rest of the day off till six.

There was one thing that helped the tiredness a little, and stopped my breast prickling and itching as well. Sunlight. It was a glorious, blue, sunny day and I went home and lay in it. For nearly seven hours. I should have burned to a crisp, but I never sunburn. It goes
in
somewhere. I've always been like this. But since those two nights on the lake I'd been spending more time than usual when the sun was out, lying in it. And I seemed to be doing more and more of it. I'd missed an old-books fair with Aimil and Zora, and the last time Mel'd suggested we go hiking I'd opted to lie in the sun in his back yard while he took another motorcycle apart. This was fine with him but it wasn't at all like me. I wasn't even reading as much as usual; it was as if I had to concentrate on soaking in as much sunshine as I could, and didn't dare distract myself from that crucial activity.

Okay, I had a lot of catching up to do. The part of me that was my grandmother's granddaughter had been having a free ride the last fifteen years, and out of nowhere I'd tapped her flat. Whether for good cause or bad. Recharging was in order.

But it wasn't just that. It was like I was under attack. And it didn't feel like it was only from my own negative thinking.

T
HERE WERE MORE
people than usual at the coffeehouse that evening too, but not as many as the night before, and there were no TV vans and nothing to make me jumpy, except maybe that six of our little SOF gang were there.
Six
? Didn't these people have
lives
?

No, they didn't have lives. SOFs weren't expected to have lives. You were a SOF, you stayed very fit and you didn't have a life. A bit like running a family coffeehouse really. Maybe that was why they felt we should be kindred spirits. And our SOFs had dinner at the coffeehouse more nights than they didn't, and a lot of the staff from our county SOF headquarters, which was only about a half a mile away north of Old Town, came by some time in the mornings for coffee and a cinnamon roll. Relax, Sunshine.

I tried to relax. They released the name of the poor bod that had got sucked: nobody any of us knew. He lived in our city, but not around here. Nothing else happened. No more dry guys, at least none left for us to find. By three days later when things appeared to be back to normal I managed to say, “Hey, how's it going,” in an ordinary voice when I found Jesse and Theo sitting at the table next to the door when I walked in for the evening dessert shift. Paulie had been in the bakery all afternoon, and he was eager to leave. I was still letting him have most any evening he wanted off, letting him put his hours in during the days; I was chiefly interested in that second morning a week I didn't have to get up at three-forty-five. I was used to not having a life, and I wanted to hold on to Paulie. He was the first apprentice I'd hired who both had a brain and liked playing with food. Also he was the first guy who didn't seem to think his manhood was under threat by having to learn stuff and take orders from someone of my age and gender. He still had to live through his first August in the bakery with the ovens on, but I was hopeful.

We emptied out a little earlier than sometimes, especially surprising on a three-day-weekend Sunday. We'd be open tomorrow while most of the rest of the working world was celebrating the birth of Jasmin Aziz, the famous code-breaker of the Voodoo Wars and why we still have Michigan, Chippewa, and most of Ontario instead of the biggest smoking hole on the planet. But she had been nicknamed Mother Durga, “She Who Is Difficult to Approach,” long before she was a hero, and the name stuck. Ha. Even if Charlie's didn't stay open automatically for three-day weekend Mondays, we'd've had to stay open for that one.

I'd pulled the last trays out of the ovens a while back, racked or frozen what wasn't going to get eaten that night, started roll and bread dough for tomorrow morning, and had come out front to sit at the counter and gossip for the last few minutes with Liz and Kyoko, who were on late that night, and Emmy, who had recently been promoted to assistant cook and wasn't sure she could take the pace. (I was slightly insulted by this, since I'd been using her in the bakery between apprentices, and felt that I must be at least as merciless and temperamental a taskmaster as anything the main kitchen crew could do.) Theo showed occasional signs of wanting to get fond of Kyoko, but she knew about SOFs, and she wasn't having any. Charlie was there, prowling; he didn't know how to sit down. Mel was closing down in the kitchen, which included preventing Kenny from sloping off early. A quiet night gave you time to catch up.